: Race and Class

ByPaul R. Mullins

Racial ideology and class inequality have
profoundly shaped the last half millennium,
but archaeologists have been oddly reticent
about the material impression of the color
line and its entanglement with class structure. An archaeology that examines race
across time and space can underscore the
complexity of the color line and illuminate
the genesis of contemporary privileges. Politically, though, some archaeologists have
been hesitant to wrestle with race and
racism or to link color and class inequalities to contemporary systems of privilege.
Instead, they have considered race as a social construction without critically examining the concrete realities of racial identities,
the distinctive epistemic privileges of differing positions along the color line, and
the ways in which an archaeology of race is
compelled to scrutinize the impression of
class on race. Archaeology risks ignoring
perhaps the most fundamental structural

features of the colonial and postcolonial
world if it evades questions about race and
racism, casts class in reductionist terms disconnected from race, or poses these considerations as somehow methodologically or
politically outside the appropriate sphere of
archaeological scholarship. This paper focuses on how a broad range of archaeologists might profit from examining how
American historical archaeologists have
linked race and class in some forms but disregarded them in other ways that tend to
squander many of the most interesting implications of an archaeology of race and
class.